Day begins like any other, which I know is the case for most other Americans.

I wake up, have devotionals with my family, practice my piano, and get ready to feed my baby brother his breakfast of baby food. While I'm feeding him, the phone rings, and the next thing I know my mom is running out of her room and turning on the TV shouting, "There's been a horrible accident!" I stand up and go look at the TV, and see two smokestacks. "Those aren't smokestacks, those are sky scrapers," my mom says. "Thousands of people work there, and two planes crashed into them."

In my 14 year old mind, I think this must be an accident. There's no way anybody is going to just fly planes into sky scrapers. Next thing I know, images of the Pentagon with smoke and fire pouring out of it are cast onto the screen. My mom says to me, "It feels like the end of the world, what is going on?" I agree, but have no words for what is going on. President Bush is speaking, and suddenly I realize that we are, indeed, under attack. Then we hear of a plane crashing near Pittsburgh.

I start to wonder how many more planes are hijacked and where are they going? I watch as one tower collapses, and then the other. As the day goes on, nothing else happens. Air space is shut down. We go to a prayer service that night. I remember an eerie quiet over the world, almost the way it feels on Christmas Day when nothing is open, and you can hear the silence.

That day, though I was only 14, I realized how much I love America. How proud I truly am to be a citizen of this great country. I grieved for people I had never even met, for the families who lost their loved ones to this cruel tragedy. I felt anger and hatred toward those hijackers who stole something so precious from so many. Though not all of us experienced personal loss in losing a loved one, we all experienced loss that day of some kind. It was unfair, unjust, and I hated it. 2,977 people never knew a post-9/11 world. That world is almost all that I can remember.

Do you remember?